Mrs. March spent the following day busying herself about the apartment in preparation for her son’s return from his school trip. She stocked the fridge with chocolate milk, string cheese, and wieners, and the pantry with toffee and nougat cookies. She arranged his stuffed animals—from tallest to shortest—on the shelf. There were no signs of cockroaches, and the back of her ear was soft again, the scab having sloughed off. One could describe her current mood as, for lack of a more exciting word, content.

As she fluffed up the pillows on Jonathan’s bed, she began to sing, “I’m nesting, nesting, nesting,” quietly to herself. She hadn’t done that since she had been pregnant with Jonathan, and making the connection untethered a succession of unpleasant memories. Memories of the baby shower, for which she had decorated her living room with paper storks and blue streamers. She had invited Mary Anne, her college roommate, hoping she might feel envious of Mrs. March for landing George (George March is the most attractive man on campus), and Jill, a dull acquaintance who had followed Mrs. March around in high school until it was just assumed that they were friends. Two of George’s cousins were also present, as was a former student of his, who seemed almost bitter to be there. Nobody from Mrs. March’s own family could make it.

In a particularly nasty bout of nausea, Mrs. March had retired to the guest bathroom, and between fits of retching, she overheard one of the women say to the rest, “You all know that she’s not ready for a baby. She can barely take care of herself.” Another said, “And with someone who’s already had one with somebody else? I could never. He’s not going to care about this pregnancy, or about this baby—he’s already gone through it all before! I mean why bother.” As Mrs. Marsh flushed the toilet, she swore she could hear laughter.

Wiping her mouth, she returned to the living room wearing a big smile, her voice quavering with overstated euphoria as she announced, “I’m back!” She played a few demeaning games—including “Guess the Mother’s Measurements,” at the gleeful request of her guests, who gripped the yarn and scissors with such relish that their knuckles paled—then she excused herself, claiming further nausea, and sent everybody home. Alone, she stood in silence in the baby’s room, staring up at the hook nailed to the ceiling for the mobile, which she had never gotten around to hanging. Later she gathered up the leftover food and decorations, as well as the baby gifts, in a big black trash bag, and threw everything out.

Then came the birth, a ghastly affair. Despite her attempts to block it out, she could still recall the doctor prying apart her sweaty legs, which she fought, sloppily, to clamp shut in her epidural haze in an effort to hide her vagina from the glaring spotlight. When a nurse folded and cleared away an absorbent pad from underneath her—a telltale sign of defecation—she dissolved into tearless sobs. The medical team assumed it was a hormonal reaction, but the abject humiliation of being prodded and exposed for hours on end was agonizing. All they wanted was the baby, she realized. Nobody cared what happened to her.

In the drugged lethargy the doctors called “recovery,” she woke up alone in her hospital bed to find her father sitting at her bedside reading the newspaper, which was rather unexpected seeing as how he had been dead for two years at that point. “Papa,” she had called to him, over and over again. Not once did he look up.

After the birth, her hair fell out in clumps. Her body secreted a thick discharge tinged with blood. Sanitary napkins were no match for the meaty threads, and the adult diapers from the box she hid behind the guest towels crinkled noisily whenever she moved. Her stitches were slow to heal, causing her discomfort long after the stipulated four weeks of recovery. But that wasn’t the worst part. The very act of being pregnant had been special. People—friends, family, strangers on the street in stores and in restaurants—had smiled at her, had loved her, had seen her. Once the baby arrived and her bump receded, saleswomen no longer approached her excitedly with questions about her due date, nobody volunteered to help her carry groceries home, nobody offered her their cab.

At first people would drop by for visits with the baby, or neighbors would ask after him in the elevator, but by the time her son was walking, their interest faded, and a silent mist of indifference settled over her once again. She blamed her child for this, for their sudden lack of attentiveness, for the wretched changes in her body, for the rapid, mutual loss of interest between her and George. She was angry at her offspring, but her guilt made her simultaneously afraid for him, for his veined, milky fragility. Out of compulsion she would check to ensure that he was breathing, up to thirty or forty times a day, once rushing back to the apartment in the middle of a performance of Swan Lake, humming the score as she ran through a dark Central Park, alarming the vagrants—and the nanny when she burst into the nursery, chest heaving.

She would hover over the crib, sometimes well into the night—in her unwashed nightgown, her hair hanging in long greasy threads—unmoving, observing the rise and fall of Jonathan’s belly, each time convincing herself she’d imagined it, and waiting to see if it would move again. It was after a few unsettling late-night encounters with this unresponsive, ghost-like Mrs. March that George stepped in and hired the baby nurse full time. Mrs. March still felt compelled to check on the baby, but the urge was less strong now that he was under the care of a woman much more qualified than her.

It struck her, now, as she refolded a blanket on Jonathan’s bed, how long it had been since she had checked in on him like that. He had never been a needy boy; he slept well through the night, had few nightmares, harbored no fear of monsters under the bed or in the closet—and she supposed she had adjusted to his self-reliance. A sharp sliver of self-reproach accompanied this observation: What if she hadn’t cared enough for him? Shouldn’t she be picking him up from his school trip herself, rather than having him ride with Mr. and Mrs. Miller, the parents of a classmate who lived just a few floors up from the Marches? But how could she manage that? Mrs. March didn’t know how to drive, and George was at a book signing in midtown.

The Millers were fine people, she supposed, although she didn’t like the way Sheila Miller sometimes regarded her with a sort of pitying smile, or how Sheila had cut her hair so short, exposing the naked nape of her neck, or how the Millers were always expressing physical affection with each other, holding hands or massaging the other’s shoulders, as if they just couldn’t restrain themselves. Perhaps they were pretending at passion, Mrs. March had fantasized. Or, she theorized, an electric thrill running up her spine, he is hiding his homosexuality and she cries every night, wishing he would touch her in the privacy of their bedroom like he does in public.

As it turned out, Sheila Miller arrived without her husband when she knocked on apartment 606. In tailored jeans tucked into shiny, colorful snow boots—both items age inappropriate in Mrs. March’s eyes—Sheila seemed to be trying too hard to be a cool, modern mom. What rankled Mrs. March most was the ire-inspiring truth that Sheila managed to pull it off with ease. Indeed Sheila was the kind of mother her son would brag about because she could unpeel an orange in a single coil. The kind of mother who was also a friend. Mrs. March’s own mother had often reminded her as a child, “I’m not your friend, nor do I care to be. I am your mother.” Mrs. March knew never to come to her mother with any issue that could be more appropriately relayed to a friend instead.

When Mrs. March opened her door to let her in, Sheila beamed, locking eyes as she always did, prompting Mrs. March to look at the floor. Behind Sheila, in walked Jonathan. Jonathan—with his upturned nose and eyes shadowed by dark circles, giving the boy a melancholy appearance and leading George, in a pretentious fit of literary whimsy, to nickname him “Poe.” Jonathan was quiet, unusually so, for a boy his age, but he did manage to exhibit a base rowdiness in the company of a friend. With a partner in tow he tended to make sounds he never made otherwise—chortling and whooping and braying—noises that echoed through the apartment like the hauntings of rabid ghosts.

Mrs. March bent down to hug him, smiling so widely that her face felt like it would split apart, and began speaking to him in a singsongy voice, one she did not use with him in private. Jonathan’s hair smelled of the cold outside and slightly of smoke, like a bonfire. He remained quiet, nodding at her high-pitched questioning (“Did you have a good time? Was it lovely there? Was it all snowy?”), while fidgeting with a Rubik’s cube that, Sheila explained, her son had gifted to Jonathan. Meanwhile, said son, Alec, hovered in the hallway outside the door, shaking his head when Mrs. March offered him some chocolate milk.

“I think they’re still full from all the sweets and French fries they’ve been eating for the past few days,” Sheila said, her tone mock-chiding. She winked at Mrs. March, who wasn’t sure how she was expected to react.

“Well, thank you so very much for bringing him, Sheila,” said Mrs. March. “Would you care for anything? Tea? Water?”

“No, thank you. We’ll just get out of your hair so you can spend the rest of the day with your boy.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. March, relieved she wouldn’t have to make further conversation. “If you need anything at all, let me know.”

“Okay then, bye! Say bye-bye, Alec.”

But Alec was already walking toward the elevator. Sheila shrugged at Mrs. March—boys!—and walked after him. Mrs. March closed the door. When she turned around, Jonathan had disappeared. She assumed he had run off to his room, eager to greet his familiar surroundings and favorite toys, but when she made her way through the hallway she realized he was in the kitchen, talking to Martha in excited whispers. “I ate the worm,” he was saying. “They dared me and I ate it.”

Embarrassed to interrupt them, Mrs. March walked on.